I agree, but many sites still use it, unfortunately. Those sites will become unavailable if Flash is removed on mobile devices.

Which makes me wonder about the wisdom of this decision. As mobile devices become more popular, website designers are forced to make a choice; keep using Flash and be unavailable on mobile devices or redesign with a switch to something else. Adobe loses either way.

It seems particularly curious to kill it when they already have(and are ostensibly releasing security updates for, to the degree Adobe ever manages that) Flash 'working' on Android versions up to 4.0

Do they gain something by killing their marketshare faster than they otherwise would through people gradually upgrading? Naively, I would think that they would try to milk the fuck out of that marketshare while they still can, and do some zealous hunting for alternatives.

I always wondered about that, why would they kill off something that is in a lot of web sites, and then I got all conspiracy theory and thought that they were in cahoots with Apple to kill Android, since Android was basically the only one that can support it, and is competition to Apple's clout

well, they called elop up for some tips...actually I'm thinking that adobe sells some expensive server-side solution for transferring vids to.h264 on the fly and sites/blogs/video services have to now do that.

I have no reason to doubt the power of Adobe's marketing department; but server-side transcoding seems unlikely to be a very lucrative niche. Flash has supported h.264 video for a while now(since somewhere in the 8.x or 9.x window, I think) and much of the 'flash video' on the web, even if it still has a.swf or.flv extension, often turns out to be h.264. In that case, the only change they'll need to make is to the site code: instead of the "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, tell them to go download flash", they'll need "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, HTML5 play".

What will be interesting is if, for those customers who actually use the fancy 'flash video' features(RTMPe, anything DRM related, whatever 'adaptive streaming' sauce Adobe may have offered) will now have the exciting opportunity to purchase the Adobe Video Client SDK for Android in order to build apps to replace their now nonfunctional websites...

Simple. Adobe sells content authoring tools. Everyone who writes in flash, has already bought the tools, and the market is saturated. Now is the time to milk all those who are rewriting their flash content into HTML5.

...and so begins a conspiracy theory people will probably wonder about for years. I'm sure the apk's will be available for loading onto rooted devices for a long time. losing access to so many sites will be painful for non root android users I'm sure.

What is this "market" of which you speak? There is no market because Flash Player is given away. There's no money, in fact it is a drain on Adobe's resources.

Adobe makes its money on the content authoring tools. All they need to do is make those tools target HTML5 and H.264 and everything and everybody's happy. They still sell the authoring tools - in fact perhaps they sell more authoring tools - and they've transferred the drain of maintaining the target platform to the browser vendors.

I suspect that that would be a no-go. They clearly don't much care about whatever pile of hacks and shims and eldrich blasphemy got Flash running on something that wasn't Win32; but I would strongly suspect that cross-platform stuff like, say, their precious little DRM system, that they hope will save them from HTML5 video by ensuring that 'premium content' providers remain loyal, is worth far more to them closed than open.

What surprises me, really, is that Adobe never got Flash to work properly even as the capabilities of handhelds have shot through the roof. Ok, Flash sucks on a 528MHz ARM11 with 192 MB of RAM and a painfully-underpolished Android 1.6 OS. Why does it still suck on systems with 2-4x as many cores(each clocked 2-3x faster and generally based on a more sophisticated ARM flavor), and a GB of RAM?

Multiple cores isn't going to help, processing is done in a single thread. Nor is more RAM, unless RAM was the problem to begin with. Most likely the bottleneck is the CPU, and I doubt you're really using a 3x faster CPU. Even if you are a 2-3x faster clock doesn't mean running code 2-3x faster- things like cache misses and mispredicted branches don't scale. Also remember that IPC is generally lower on ARM than on comparable x86 chips, so comparing raw numbers isn't that much of a help.

Yup. Flash always sucked on low powered CPUs like Atom. It'll consume 20% on a modern fast CPU with accelerated video and if you don't have video acceleration it'll be much higher.On an Atom Netbook with Intel GMA under Linux it's unusable. I disabled the plugin, downloaded the.flv files and played them with VLC - no problem.

That defeats the ability to access the info quickly, which is what a web site did. Now you expect someone to install an app? People are already slowing down on that because of all the security issues. Presumably most apps are not an issue. But enough are that people are learning to just not install anything that comes around. The app model is basically dangerous because Android doesn't isolate them very well (neither does iOS for that matter).

Hopefully they choose to redesign and switch to something else. Flash is nothing but bad news for anything other than playing video and stupid little (although often fun) flash games. It really has no place in a good website design. I can't stand most pages that use flash extensively (I usually hit back as soon as I see that loading bar).

I created a few games in Flash for playing in a webbrowser, and for the lols I also tried it on an Android, and it worked quite well actually! Sad to see it go.

Flash allows creating a complete game with all graphics, audio, etc... in a single file, that works the same on almost all platforms. This is quite handy. So I really wish Flash to stay strong, and, have a fully perfect open source player (in other words, have the official player itself be open source).

While the Flash plugin was never great, there's a reason Flash lived for so long -- fantastic authoring tools. Drag-and-drop GUIs, full featured IDEs, etc. made it a snap to build great looking Flash apps.

Until HTML5 has equivalent authoring tools, it's not truly going to be able to replace Flash.

I've never seen a company "give up" like this. I would have thought Adobe would have a vested interest in making their software work on a platform everyone is clamoring to dominate. It's like they just said "meh,.. F- it". They also discontinued Flash on Linux (not sure about mac).

Does it have a similar feature set compared to Flash? Are things like animation and syncing audio supported? Can you create vector graphics and have it exported as a canvas or SVG? I think it's going to be a bitch to transition to HTML5 for creating e-learning content. The ideal situation would be that Flash would be able to export to HTML5 without losing any functionality, I can't see that happening though.

Does it have a similar feature set compared to Flash? Are things like animation and syncing audio supported? Can you create vector graphics and have it exported as a canvas or SVG? I think it's going to be a bitch to transition to HTML5 for creating e-learning content. The ideal situation would be that Flash would be able to export to HTML5 without losing any functionality, I can't see that happening though.

No, But some years ago when this roadmap was made it was supposed to happen "real soon now"(tm)(html5 getting to that stage on all browsers including mobiles).

The flash runtime is really only a cost for them: they have to maintain it ('cause it's so secure!), optimize it, and port it to a lot of platforms.

What they make money on is the flash toolkit. Adobe has decided that maintaining the runtime isn't worth is and instead moving their toolkit over to HTML 5 (and continuing along with being able to export video, etc). Really, it's mostly a win for them. They kept going along with the runtime because it did afford them certain benefits, the install base (which they monopolize) in particular... I think I hear it was something like 90% which probably beats HTML 5 by a wide margin. However, they see the writing on the wall: HTML 5 is getting more common and flash player less. They have a mature toolkit and it's time they compete on that alone and stop wasting (excess) resources working on a costly* side project that really only made sense half a decade ago.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: The irony is that Adobe does not see that by dropping support for platforms, fewer developers will want to use Flash because it is no longer "cross-platform." And if fewer developers want to use Flash, then fewer people will consume Flash content... and eventually Adobe will decide to drop support on yet another platform because fewer people are consuming Flash there. The cycle feeds itself. It's only a matter of time before Flash goes away entirely.

Here's [slashdot.org] the/. story from earlier this year. They're discontinuing the standalone Linux plugin, but made a deal with Google to support a new Pepper-API version of it in Chrome. Apparently Chrome-only, because nobody else so far is implementing that API.

I do not see the need for a flash player going away any time soon due to the immense amount of content in Flash. Flash is so widespread it is hard to get rid of. It seems Adobe is attacking Google here, perhaps because Google is switching to HTML5.

I agree it would be best for Flash to disappear, Adobe is a corrupt, evil company that uses various unsavory practices. But how to get contnent developers to stop using it? As long as people keep making stuff in flash unfortunately it will remain popular. Part of the issue is making a good replacement for flash. HTML5 helps a.lot with this but as well what really makes flash popular is that developers love Adobe Flash development tools. The sad thing is flash's development tools are very popular with developers and I do not see them giving up flash until something better comes along. I have yet to see anything come along that actually can exceed the features and ease of use of Adobes tools.

Many here presume Flash will go away. This is sort of like saying Linux will become popular, people here do not understand why people use software, they use software because it works well. Adobe has great tools that work well and just expecting people to stop using them when there are no alternatives or the alternatives are inferior is absurd.

Moreover, the issue with DRM (either abolish it, or create an open standard, I leave it to you to determine which is more practical...) hasn't been addressed yet. Companies like Hulu and Amazon use Flash specifically to prevent people from being able to download streaming video and save it onto their devices.

Then patronize the restaurants' competitors. I just tried chick-fil-a.com, for example, and it works just fine in Firefox with Flashblock on. Do you want me to try the site on my Nexus 7 tablet when I get home to make sure it's 100% pure HTML5?

That is an example of the sort of mystery meat navigation [webpagesthatsuck.com] that would get a site featured on webpagesthatsuck.com: a logo and seven donuts that respond to mouseover. And it's not even Flash-based MMN; it's MMN in HTML. Back to CFA for me.

A restaurant web site works best when it's the 1990s era web site. A single page with the address, a map, the phone number, and hours of operation. Another web page linked from the first that shows their menu. That's all a restaurant needs. It's amazing how many restaurants and other businesses can't even be bother to post their hours of operation on their website, or put their phone number in an easy to find location, preferably on the front page.

Flash wasn't just about videos and ads on the internet. Some of us developed useful applications like forms for front line people, reports for pointed hair people and video games (look up sharpform - a lot of video game UI's run on Flash). Its sad that the platforms it supports is shrinking and not growing.

Ages ago when I worked for Adobe - an internal conference was show casing everything they just acquired from Macromedia. The mantra was "the future of the company is everything we just acquired" (that wasn't the official mantra, but after attending plenty of developer sessions that was what I was feeling) - I'm sure that is still true to a certain extent, but there was a genuine feeling that Flash could actually take on Java as a web runtime - especially because we were going to have the worlds first full runtime on a mobile device (at the time they were talking about Symbian and WebOS).

Don't laugh - one of the internet's biggest websites youtube.com runs on top of Flash media server:) (or at least it used to!). Also this was long before HTML-5 and Javascript was showing any promise. If you wanted to have a rich web app your choices were Java or Flash.

Flash on Android isn't going away, it's just changing. You can write apps in Flash, package them as Adobe Air apps and install them on Android just fine. That's how it's worked on iOS for a long time now because of Apple's restrictions on browser plugins, so I imagine this is just their way of consolidating development efforts on both platforms.

Prior to the use of H.264, it was H.263. Prior to H.263, and continuing for some time after H.263, it was vectors. For example, Weebl's Stuff, Homestar Runner, and most of the animations on Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep are vectors. What tool for authoring Canvas or SVG vector animations for an HTML5 environment do you recommend?

You are correct that no new Flash videos use Sorenson. But not everybody who has created an old Sorenson based video and hasn't yet bothered to convert it is contactable. And more importantly to the central point that I was trying to make, you didn't address vector-based animations at all.

So exactly why do we need Flash for web video? We don't. It's superfluous.

We don't need it for web video, where "video" refers to compressed sequences of pixel-based images. But we still need it for web vector animation. I tried converting a.swf vector animation to video by rasterizing each frame of the animation and compressing the frames as a video, and the file size bloated by a factor of ten.

How big would "Badger Badger Badger", a 36-second vector animation loop, become if converted from vectors to H.264? Or "We Drink Ritalin", a music video for a John Desire song? Or "French Erotic Film", a music video for an Ome Henk song?

You seem to be arguing against a point I never tried to make. But for content providers the video streaming framework is still more mature than for HTML5 video. That is why people still use it. My point was only about addressing the complaint of getting rid of Flash meant it was being replaced by H.264, but this is silly since Flash video IS H.264 in almost every case nowadays.

Didn't mean to sound argumentative... was more exuberant. Flash, however, was never needed for what it was used for 99% of the time. Another thread mentioned Black and Tans... so I thought of a terrible metaphor. Flash is like Harp... a decent pale lager, but it becomes exceptional when mixed properly, wrapped, as it were, around Guinness... which unfortunately for this metaphor can only be vector animation or a web game. So... Adobe says "Hey! What's good for Guiness is good for EVERYTHING! Mix it with your gin! It's a better vermouth! Mix it with your whiskey, it's a better sour!" Trouble is, Harp doesn't mix that well with anything but Guinness, no matter what the bartender says. And eventually, people will start hating Harp... because its just awful when it's used improperly, and unless it's by itself or with Guinness, it's being used improperly. Flash was never intended to be a video wrapper... that was just something that it could do but only did well during the very earliest part of the last decade under special circumstances, before bandwidth was taken for granted. Adobe kept leveraging it for video, however, long after it was reasonable to do so. Eventually, everyone hates Flash and forgets that its actually a decent app platform and wonderful for vector animation. Had Adobe stepped back off pushing it as a video wrapper, for which it is terrible for the extra processing overhead, and left it to find it's true usefulness, perhaps most web users wouldn't despise it.

Will realise they've just cheered away a product that works for one that doesn't.

Flash was shite, it was a slow, buggy, CPU chewing pile of scrotum. I'll be the first to admit that but flash did everything it said on the tin and a bit more. HTML5 at current cant even do what it says on its own tin, let alone half of what was on Flash's tin.

We've traded away a slow, reliable and butt ugly mechanic for a person who cant even tell the difference between a valve and a vagina and people are happy about this.

That depends on which carriers the good ones work on. The budget carriers in the United States, for example, tend to run CDMA2000 instead of GSM, and CDMA2000 is much worse than GSM/UMTS at letting customers bring their own phone. Which U.S. carrier offers voice and data service as cheap as Virgin Mobile's $35/mo plan yet allows customers to bring their own phone? Or is a customer supposed to buy two phones: one to run apps (as if it were a 4" tablet) and one to make calls?

HTML5 is terrible at the moment if you want to make games, or do any fancy animation type stuff with it.
Even on a high end desktop PC it fairly chugs along, and has a major problem - you need WebGL to get any useful level of graphics performance, and Microsoft have no plans to support that in IE.